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Who Was That Food Stylist? Film Credits Roll On

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: January 11, 2004

They are known as closing credits, but the other day at a movie theater in Times Square, after three and a half epic hours of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," the credits did not seem to want to close.

It took five minutes for the names of all the actors, producers, editors, gaffers, grips, best boys, dialect coaches, wig makers and steelworkers to crawl by. Next came the less familiar show-business occupations like stable foreman, horse makeup artist, horseshoer and the two guys in charge of the chain mail.

At eight minutes, the moviegoers still in the theater were watching a scroll of completely inscrutable titles like "wrangler manager" and "compositing inferno artist." Of course, the caterer had to be immortalized, too.

Finally, 9 minutes and 33 seconds after they began, the closing credits came to a close.

John Rodriguez, a subway track worker, was the only person left in the theater. (The cleaning crew had come and gone.) He shrugged.

"I like to get my $10 worth," he said. "I didn't really notice how long they were."

But plenty of people have. Movie credits, which used to last an average of three to four minutes, have joined the list of other things in Hollywood — like egos and salaries — suffering from inflation. Once, moviemakers considered anything longer than seven minutes — the credits for "Titanic" and "Waterworld" were in that range — to be pushing the bounds of propriety and audience patience.

But with the growth of computer animation, union rules, copyright laws and lots of good old-fashioned favoritism, several credit sequences have blown past that old limit.

Companies that make titles say the average, even for regular dialogue-driven movies, has increased to as long as five minutes.

"It just seems to me that there are a lot more menial guys who get credit now who didn't several years ago," said Rick Sparr, a vice president at Pacific Title and Art Studio, one of the oldest title-makers.

"I mean, the guy who unfolds the craft table gets credit now," he said. "It's really out of control."

Not that he is complaining. It is good for business. But he and others in the business have joined many moviegoers in wondering where it will end.

Does the set masseuse really need to be credited? (One was at the end of "The Matrix." )

Does the helicopter pilot? (Most big-budget productions nowadays seem to have one, and the pilot is invariably named, alongside accountants and publicity agents.)

What about the Romanian Army liaison aide and the person described as the food stylist? (Both were named at the end of "Cold Mountain." )

In fact, while questions are being asked, here are two more. Is there a difference between the second second assistant director and the third assistant director, and do all these assistants really have to be named? (The answers to those questions, producers say, are "not much" and "yes.")

"I think it's monstrous," David Thomson, the critic, said. "It's one of those signs of the decadence in our film business altogether."

Mr. Thomson, author of the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, said he still kept his seat until the bitter end, when the house lights come up and most everyone has left, "but only for professional reasons."

"I find it a horrible bore," he said. "Honestly, if you train the horses, you don't need your name up there."

In the early history of motion pictures, credits were nearly always at the beginning of movies and were handed out so sparingly that they rarely took more than two minutes of screen time.

The 1922 vampire classic "Nosferatu," a kind of special-effects vehicle of its day, credited only 11 cast members and 5 others, including the director and cinematographer, and the credits lasted 1 minute 35 seconds.

But by the late 1960's and early 70's, credits had grown so long that filmmakers began to shift most of them to the end of movies, giving them the freedom to grow even longer, especially with the rise of blockbuster movies with special effects and computer-generated imagery.

According to Baseline, which compiles information about movies, the original "Star Wars" in 1977 listed 143 people in its credits. In 1999, "The Matrix" listed 551, including Longy Nguyin, a sports masseuse. Last year, "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" listed 559 names, "Finding Nemo" listed 642, and the third installment of the "Matrix" series had 701.

In the world of animation, as just one example to show how the complexity of newer movies involves many more people, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in 1937, the first full-length animated feature movie, listed only 24 animators. The credits for "Finding Nemo" list 52 animators, plus 104 computer-graphics-imagery artists, divided into teams for jobs like "sharks," "reefs," "schooling and flocking" and "ocean."

But "credit creep," as some people in Hollywood have called it, is happening even in movies without multinational teams of computer programmers. In independent film shorts, for example, where many people work without being paid and a screen credit is their only form of compensation, credits can sometimes last a fourth as long as the short itself. In some movies with limited budgets, travel agencies and other companies are sometimes given credit — in essence free advertising in a prestigious format — if they agree to work for less.

And in big-budget movies with powerful stars, the stars often succeed in winning screen credit for anyone who has anything to do with their performances. In "Master and Commander," the list of attendants to Russell Crowe alone reads like the staff list at a small company: his costumer, two hairstylists, a makeup artist, two special makeup artists, a stunt double, a stand-in, a trainer, a dialect coach, a swordmaster, three violin coaches, two assistants and the name of the company that provided his personal security.

The final cut when it comes to credits can be highly arbitrary, especially for extras and performers with little screen time. Consider poor Ted Shred, a stuntman who specializes in fire breathing. Mr. Shred has, in fact, breathed fire on screen in six feature-length movies, including the hit "Charlie's Angels," but has never been credited for doing it.

"I guess the producers sit around and they say: `Well, who can we bump? Oh, let's bump the fire-breather,' " he said. "I don't know why it happens. It's nepotism, man."

Some major studios, like Warner Brothers, are known for working to keep credit creep from occurring. But battles are sometimes fought among studios and producers and directors over which marginal names (in other words, which sons, daughters, cousins, friends, neighbors and business partners) make the cut. In one recent major movie, more than 100 names were cut from the credit list at the last minute by the studio, which felt the credits went on way too long, according to a person involved in the movie, who asked that it not be named.

Mr. Sparr, whose Pacific Title creates the credits for more than 100 movies a year, said he believed that those for "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," which his company produced, lasted longer than any others he has ever worked on.

"And you can only run it so fast," he said, "because if you run it too fast, it's going to start to strobe."

Mr. Sparr said that in the end he thought inflation of closing credits would be checked only by purely physical limits. When 35-millimeter prints begin to require an extra reel just to accommodate the credits, the cost will probably drive some studios to declare an ultimatum.